The rationale looks commendable. Publishers want to do their bit for Black History Month. But the results are disastrous. Black authors find themselves competing with other black authors as at no other time during the year. A lot of good books get lost in the flood, particularly the work of up-and-coming writers, who are always first to see their work published in February. Mainstream publishers, who used to argue that books by blacks or about blacks don’t sell, now defend the habit of corralling black books in February by saying that it’s the only time they can get bookstores, particularly the chains, to devote display space to these titles. But this ignores the fact that there are more than 200 bookstores in the United States specializing in African-American titles-all year long.
The handful of black editors and agents in the mostly white world of mainstream publishing decry this situation. They call it patronizing and argue that it proves how out of touch publishers are with the growing number of black middle-class readers–and white readers interested in reading black authors. “If there were more black editors in this town,” says Erroll McDonald, executive editor at Pantheon, “You couldn’t get away with what goes on in Black History Month.”
There are signs that mainstream publishing is catching on. African-American writers with name recognition now usually get to avoid the February glut. Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker and Terry McMillan all have fiction appearing later this spring. Nevertheless, old habits die hard. In order to give attention to at least a few of the black authors published in February-without seeming to encourage publishers to do the same thing next year-NEWSWEEK has done the only conscionable thing. We’re reviewing the books in March.
1959
By Thulani Davis. 297 pages. Grove Weidenfeld. $19.95
For her first novel, journalist Thulani Davis handed herself an intimidating assignment. In “1959, “she’s combined a coming-of-age story with an evocative portrait of a segregated community on the cusp of the ’60s. What happens when the blacks of Turner, Va., get fed up with their lot can be read as a microhistory of the civil-rights movement, and even a grimly prophetic emblem of the entire African-American experience. Rather than integrate in the face of a black boycott, whites order the town to be, literally, demolished.
Given the breadth of Davis’s interests, it’s hard to see her settling for a less ambitious scheme. She’s researched or recalled then-current news, fashions and obsessions, and her characters stay in character. (She’s good at nailing exactly what music they’d favor: she knows Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon are not interchangeable.) Her account of how a black community discovers its own power–and that power’s limits-is persuasive. But she seems to lose interest in the story of her narrator, a 12-year-old girl named Willie Tarrant.
Davis may simply have gotten tired of lugging Willie around to witness the big scenes. (After making her eavesdrop like Tom Sawyer, Davis gives up and lets her narrate what she couldn’t know firsthand-including other characters’ thoughts.) But it makes thematic sense that Willie loses track of her own story: the blacks of Turner achieve their Pyrrhic victory because they’re willing to drop their private quirks and quarrels for the common good. “You know, you a good-for-nothing elitist Negro,” says the local barber as he forces a picket sign on the local novelist at a demonstration. “Just get in here, we need another body in this group. "
Selflessness may work in a demonstration; it doesn’t play in fiction. Coleman the writer and Ralph the barber are more compelling when brooding alone and listening to (respectively) Miles and Dexter than when standing shoulder to shoulder. As the community comes together, the characters are having the time of their lives-or so we’re told. (“Maddie beamed. She had found her natural work, organizing folks.’) We’re happy for them. But not with them.
DAVID GATES
Native Stranger
By Eddy L. Harris. 315 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.
Eddy Harris spent a year traveling through Africa, searching for some sense of a spiritual home. “Although I am not African,” he writes, “there is a line that connects that place with this one, the place we come from and the place we find ourselves. " Or so he thought at the outset. He meandered from Tunisia to South Africa. Along the way, he encountered astonishing kindness, appalling cruelty, great wealth and even greater poverty, disease, corruption-all the usual suspects in any postcolonial African lineup.
The continent’s manifold contradictions left Harris with a divided mind. “I love this place and resent it at the same time,” he writes, “and Africa reciprocates, trapped as we both are in this middle ground somewhere between black and white, past and future.” But a man with a divided mind makes a good witness, because he tries doubly hard to make sense of what he sees.
This is no ordinary travel book. Harris’s account of his time in a Liberian jail would do Orwell proud. His descriptions of the people he encountered are memorably sanguine, none more so than the Senegalese man who provided him with an explanation of the generosity that he met at every turn: “In Africa, we have nothing but our vitality … And so we share all that we have, even though we have nothing. It is how we know how much we have. It is, too, how we know how much we lack. "
Harris emerged from Africa unencumbered by the dream of a Promised Land. “My skin is black. My culture is not.” And while he acknowledges the human “hunger to belong,” to always “search for ways to identify the ones who are like us and the ones who are not, " he insists that for black Americans, Africa is not the answer. “Africa is not our home. Should the volcano erupt, we will have no place but the United States. If it isn’t going to work there, if we can’t make it work there, it isn’t going to work.” This thoughtful, closely observed and often beautifully written book makes an overwhelming case for that argument.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
Company Man
By Brent Wade. 219 pages. Algonquin. $18.95.
You might call this “The Black Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Once again we’re in the halls of power with a man who’s selling his soul-and this time betraying his ethnicity-all for the sake of climbing the corporate ladder. And wouldn’t you know that the price of this selling out is going to be psychically high. Sure enough, the narrator, William Covington, tells the story from a hospital bed, where he’s wound up as the result of a botched suicide attempt.
The biographical information on the dust jacket of “Company Man” says that author Brent Wade has worked for such firms as AT&T and Westinghouse, but he often writes as though he learned about corporate life from watching made-for-TV movies. The reason the cliches tend to leap out at you, though, is precisely because elsewhere in the novel Wade shows so much original talent. When he abandons his theme of the Black Man in Corporate America and lets his quirky, bitterly satirical imagination go where it will, things pick right up. There is, for example, the hilarious scene in which Covington, having consulted a urologist about his sexual impotence, discovers that the receptionist with whom he has been flirting is the doctor’s wife. “I envisioned my case discussed over the dinner table. I convinced myself that she knew.” Or the wryly amusing scene in which Covington’s father-in-law, black Richmond’s representative to the white power structure, solemnly reveals his enormous private library of Afrocentric literature to his dumbstruck son-in-law.
Written as a series of letters to a long-lost childhood friend, “Company Man " is oddly reminiscent of Walker Percy’s “Lancelot, " another uneven confessional novel made insidiously readable by its tone of rage and paranoia verging on madness. When Brent Wade concentrates on describing what it’s like inside the head of a man going slowly and helplessly nuts, he writes memorably.
M.J.
Love in Black and White
By Mark and Gail Mathabane. 274 pages. HarperCollins. $20.
They met as graduate students, fell in love over a passion for literature, justice, art and exercise, got married and had two adorable children. Not much of a plot here except that Mark Mathabane is a black South African and his wife, Gail, an all-American blonde. Their story is arresting precisely because so much of it is so normal.
“If someone had told me while I was growing up in a South African ghetto that I would someday end up marrying a white woman, I would have thought them insane,” writes Mark, whose childhood under apartheid and escape to America with a tennis scholarship were recorded in his 1986 best seller, “Kaffir Boy.” Gail was no more likely a candidate for interracial marriage. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she spent most of her early years in white, Midwestern communities. Only during junior high did she encounter blacks on a daily basis, and that was at a racially mixed school where bigotry and harassment on both sides were the rule. Somehow, perhaps miraculously, both Mark and Gail emerged from childhood with an ability to see past skin color.
Mark and Gail contribute alternating sections of the book until the last two chapters, which they write together. The format works well; in fact, it seems a symbol of the tale they tell. While dating, living together and deciding whether to marry, the two fight separate battles: Gail with her family, who opposed the match, and Mark with his own image as a black public figure. When they do marry, it’s in secret; only months later do they work up the courage to commit themselves in a formal ceremony before friends and family. Married life and the birth of their first child help them meet new obstacles as a team. Eventually they both learn to counter the inevitable incidents of racism with strength and faith.
As so often happens in love stories, the Mathabanes’ problems make better reading than their frequent affirmations of devotion. But the honesty that is deeply rooted in every paragraph makes this book a moving one.
LAURA SHAPIRO
Crossover
By Dennis Williams. 315 pages. Summit. $20.
Dennis Williams’s ambitious first novel is an account of growing up black in an era marked by public trauma. Richard Isaac, known as Ike, leaves the mother who raised him alone to go to an Ivy League school where blacks are a small, embittered minority. It’s 1969, students are taking sides, and sticking to the middle of the road is a luxury a black freshman can’t afford. Ike is no militant: he likes music, he doesn’t mind studying and his chief preoccupation is his white girlfriend, Cheryl. The other blacks on campus all but dismiss him, until an escalating racial crisis culminates in a black takeover of the library and Ike finds himself in the thick of it. After this baptism of sorts, Ike begins the painful process by which he will learn to reconcile the demands of his social and political world with his own desires.
This novel would have been well served by a tough editor: the rambling plot and a roster of meagerly developed characters make the book more of a slog to get through than it should be. But Williams, a former NEWSWEEK writer, can be a vivid and affecting storyteller, and he has a lot to say. One hopes he’s at work on a second novel; it would be worth watching for.
L.S.
title: “Now You See Them…” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Penny Covert”
The rationale looks commendable. Publishers want to do their bit for Black History Month. But the results are disastrous. Black authors find themselves competing with other black authors as at no other time during the year. A lot of good books get lost in the flood, particularly the work of up-and-coming writers, who are always first to see their work published in February. Mainstream publishers, who used to argue that books by blacks or about blacks don’t sell, now defend the habit of corralling black books in February by saying that it’s the only time they can get bookstores, particularly the chains, to devote display space to these titles. But this ignores the fact that there are more than 200 bookstores in the United States specializing in African-American titles-all year long.
The handful of black editors and agents in the mostly white world of mainstream publishing decry this situation. They call it patronizing and argue that it proves how out of touch publishers are with the growing number of black middle-class readers–and white readers interested in reading black authors. “If there were more black editors in this town,” says Erroll McDonald, executive editor at Pantheon, “You couldn’t get away with what goes on in Black History Month.”
There are signs that mainstream publishing is catching on. African-American writers with name recognition now usually get to avoid the February glut. Toni Morrison, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker and Terry McMillan all have fiction appearing later this spring. Nevertheless, old habits die hard. In order to give attention to at least a few of the black authors published in February-without seeming to encourage publishers to do the same thing next year-NEWSWEEK has done the only conscionable thing. We’re reviewing the books in March.
1959
By Thulani Davis. 297 pages. Grove Weidenfeld. $19.95
For her first novel, journalist Thulani Davis handed herself an intimidating assignment. In “1959, “she’s combined a coming-of-age story with an evocative portrait of a segregated community on the cusp of the ’60s. What happens when the blacks of Turner, Va., get fed up with their lot can be read as a microhistory of the civil-rights movement, and even a grimly prophetic emblem of the entire African-American experience. Rather than integrate in the face of a black boycott, whites order the town to be, literally, demolished.
Given the breadth of Davis’s interests, it’s hard to see her settling for a less ambitious scheme. She’s researched or recalled then-current news, fashions and obsessions, and her characters stay in character. (She’s good at nailing exactly what music they’d favor: she knows Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon are not interchangeable.) Her account of how a black community discovers its own power–and that power’s limits-is persuasive. But she seems to lose interest in the story of her narrator, a 12-year-old girl named Willie Tarrant.
Davis may simply have gotten tired of lugging Willie around to witness the big scenes. (After making her eavesdrop like Tom Sawyer, Davis gives up and lets her narrate what she couldn’t know firsthand-including other characters’ thoughts.) But it makes thematic sense that Willie loses track of her own story: the blacks of Turner achieve their Pyrrhic victory because they’re willing to drop their private quirks and quarrels for the common good. “You know, you a good-for-nothing elitist Negro,” says the local barber as he forces a picket sign on the local novelist at a demonstration. “Just get in here, we need another body in this group. "
Selflessness may work in a demonstration; it doesn’t play in fiction. Coleman the writer and Ralph the barber are more compelling when brooding alone and listening to (respectively) Miles and Dexter than when standing shoulder to shoulder. As the community comes together, the characters are having the time of their lives-or so we’re told. (“Maddie beamed. She had found her natural work, organizing folks.’) We’re happy for them. But not with them.
DAVID GATES
Native Stranger
By Eddy L. Harris. 315 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.
Eddy Harris spent a year traveling through Africa, searching for some sense of a spiritual home. “Although I am not African,” he writes, “there is a line that connects that place with this one, the place we come from and the place we find ourselves. " Or so he thought at the outset. He meandered from Tunisia to South Africa. Along the way, he encountered astonishing kindness, appalling cruelty, great wealth and even greater poverty, disease, corruption-all the usual suspects in any postcolonial African lineup.
The continent’s manifold contradictions left Harris with a divided mind. “I love this place and resent it at the same time,” he writes, “and Africa reciprocates, trapped as we both are in this middle ground somewhere between black and white, past and future.” But a man with a divided mind makes a good witness, because he tries doubly hard to make sense of what he sees.
This is no ordinary travel book. Harris’s account of his time in a Liberian jail would do Orwell proud. His descriptions of the people he encountered are memorably sanguine, none more so than the Senegalese man who provided him with an explanation of the generosity that he met at every turn: “In Africa, we have nothing but our vitality … And so we share all that we have, even though we have nothing. It is how we know how much we have. It is, too, how we know how much we lack. "
Harris emerged from Africa unencumbered by the dream of a Promised Land. “My skin is black. My culture is not.” And while he acknowledges the human “hunger to belong,” to always “search for ways to identify the ones who are like us and the ones who are not, " he insists that for black Americans, Africa is not the answer. “Africa is not our home. Should the volcano erupt, we will have no place but the United States. If it isn’t going to work there, if we can’t make it work there, it isn’t going to work.” This thoughtful, closely observed and often beautifully written book makes an overwhelming case for that argument.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
Company Man
By Brent Wade. 219 pages. Algonquin. $18.95.
You might call this “The Black Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Once again we’re in the halls of power with a man who’s selling his soul-and this time betraying his ethnicity-all for the sake of climbing the corporate ladder. And wouldn’t you know that the price of this selling out is going to be psychically high. Sure enough, the narrator, William Covington, tells the story from a hospital bed, where he’s wound up as the result of a botched suicide attempt.
The biographical information on the dust jacket of “Company Man” says that author Brent Wade has worked for such firms as AT&T and Westinghouse, but he often writes as though he learned about corporate life from watching made-for-TV movies. The reason the cliches tend to leap out at you, though, is precisely because elsewhere in the novel Wade shows so much original talent. When he abandons his theme of the Black Man in Corporate America and lets his quirky, bitterly satirical imagination go where it will, things pick right up. There is, for example, the hilarious scene in which Covington, having consulted a urologist about his sexual impotence, discovers that the receptionist with whom he has been flirting is the doctor’s wife. “I envisioned my case discussed over the dinner table. I convinced myself that she knew.” Or the wryly amusing scene in which Covington’s father-in-law, black Richmond’s representative to the white power structure, solemnly reveals his enormous private library of Afrocentric literature to his dumbstruck son-in-law.
Written as a series of letters to a long-lost childhood friend, “Company Man " is oddly reminiscent of Walker Percy’s “Lancelot, " another uneven confessional novel made insidiously readable by its tone of rage and paranoia verging on madness. When Brent Wade concentrates on describing what it’s like inside the head of a man going slowly and helplessly nuts, he writes memorably.
M.J.
Love in Black and White
By Mark and Gail Mathabane. 274 pages. HarperCollins. $20.
They met as graduate students, fell in love over a passion for literature, justice, art and exercise, got married and had two adorable children. Not much of a plot here except that Mark Mathabane is a black South African and his wife, Gail, an all-American blonde. Their story is arresting precisely because so much of it is so normal.
“If someone had told me while I was growing up in a South African ghetto that I would someday end up marrying a white woman, I would have thought them insane,” writes Mark, whose childhood under apartheid and escape to America with a tennis scholarship were recorded in his 1986 best seller, “Kaffir Boy.” Gail was no more likely a candidate for interracial marriage. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she spent most of her early years in white, Midwestern communities. Only during junior high did she encounter blacks on a daily basis, and that was at a racially mixed school where bigotry and harassment on both sides were the rule. Somehow, perhaps miraculously, both Mark and Gail emerged from childhood with an ability to see past skin color.
Mark and Gail contribute alternating sections of the book until the last two chapters, which they write together. The format works well; in fact, it seems a symbol of the tale they tell. While dating, living together and deciding whether to marry, the two fight separate battles: Gail with her family, who opposed the match, and Mark with his own image as a black public figure. When they do marry, it’s in secret; only months later do they work up the courage to commit themselves in a formal ceremony before friends and family. Married life and the birth of their first child help them meet new obstacles as a team. Eventually they both learn to counter the inevitable incidents of racism with strength and faith.
As so often happens in love stories, the Mathabanes’ problems make better reading than their frequent affirmations of devotion. But the honesty that is deeply rooted in every paragraph makes this book a moving one.
LAURA SHAPIRO
Crossover
By Dennis Williams. 315 pages. Summit. $20.
Dennis Williams’s ambitious first novel is an account of growing up black in an era marked by public trauma. Richard Isaac, known as Ike, leaves the mother who raised him alone to go to an Ivy League school where blacks are a small, embittered minority. It’s 1969, students are taking sides, and sticking to the middle of the road is a luxury a black freshman can’t afford. Ike is no militant: he likes music, he doesn’t mind studying and his chief preoccupation is his white girlfriend, Cheryl. The other blacks on campus all but dismiss him, until an escalating racial crisis culminates in a black takeover of the library and Ike finds himself in the thick of it. After this baptism of sorts, Ike begins the painful process by which he will learn to reconcile the demands of his social and political world with his own desires.
This novel would have been well served by a tough editor: the rambling plot and a roster of meagerly developed characters make the book more of a slog to get through than it should be. But Williams, a former NEWSWEEK writer, can be a vivid and affecting storyteller, and he has a lot to say. One hopes he’s at work on a second novel; it would be worth watching for.
L.S.
